Latin America

ON THE WOK ED TODAY

LATIN AMERICANS tend to see all politics, including Washington’s, in terms of personal leadership. Consequently, when Vice President Wallace was removed from the top post at the Board of Economic Warfare, with its widely ramifying economic contacts with Latin America, and Mr. Welles was eliminated as chief contact man for Good Neighbor arrangements at the State Department, many Latin Americans tended to conclude, somewhat emotionally, that the period of hemisphere “understanding” was waning. From their point of view, their favorite Washington representatives had been fired.

And in somewhat more subtle ways, certain of our recent overseas policies have been upsetting to the neighbors. The democratic elements, for instance, were distressed by the fact that Washington policy seemed to treat the hostile Badoglio-King Victor Emmanuel government in Italy with scrupulous respect. Italian democratic elements are strongly represented in several South American countries, notably Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. And because the United States has appeared hesitant about playing ball with the democratic forces in Europe, and has seemed to be keen on being polite to reactionary “law and order ” groups, like the Badoglio government in Italy, the liberal groups in the Latin American republics readily conclude that dictators will also be preferred to liberal regimes in their countries in the post-war period.

Argentina gets it straight

Such uncertainties have encouraged the new7 military oligarchy in Argentina to believe that it could “get away with murder” in its general isolationist and anti-democratic attitude toward the war and the Linited Nations. During August, the new foreign minister of the Ramirez regime in Argentina, Vice Admiral Segundo Storni, sent a note to Secretary of State Hull asking for Lend-Lease arms and oil equipment to restore Argentina to a “position of equilibrium” in the South American military powrer balances and to increase the republic’s industrial productivity. Argentina deserved these concessions, the Admiral argued, because she had sold her food and manufactured products copiously to the United Nations and had recently deprived the Axis embassies of the right to send secret code messages. The Storni note also contained elaborate explanations of the failure of Argentina to break relations with the Axis powers.

It was a better than average opening for Mr. Hull’s talents. In his reply of September 8 to the “chivalrous” Admiral, the Secretary began by refusing the requests. He made it clear that Argentina is still the best Nazi espionage and propaganda center in the hemisphere, by favor of its present government; and that the republic has not carried through with either its political or its economic commitments toward the war as an American power, and is not playing its part in building up the defense of the hemisphere.

He added that Argentina has been paid big money for its economic “contributions” to the Allies, and that denial of code privileges to the Axis is meaningless so long as trans-Atlantic telephones are open from Buenos Aires. Lend-Lease arms allotments, Mr. Hull concluded, are meant for hemisphere defense, not for establishing military equilibriums on the American continents, and the purpose of oil machinery allotments is to produce larger oil stocks for all the American nations, not for individual republics.

It was certainly the worst rebuke that any American country has received from Washington since the Good Neighbor policy was initiated.

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Suspicions unwarranted

These circumstances are naturally not cited to persuade anyone that the Latin Americans are right in their suspicions of Washington. There is nothing to warrant impressions either that the volume of assistance to inter-American collaboration is scheduled to he cut down, or that imperialistic ideas for the hemisphere are making headway in any sector of our government.

But understanding between twenty-one not wholly compatible republics does not depend entirely on what the facts really are. It depends on what the political elements in the Latin American republics think the facts are.

Bolivia boils

An outstanding case study from this angle is Bolivia — since last spring a full belligerent. Bolivia next year is due for a presidential election. As a result Bolivia is boiling.

To begin with, both of the country’s principal parties — President Peharanda’s conservative party, more or less in league with the republic’s big tin interests; and the rather mild labor elements united in a group with the fearsome name of the Revolutionary Left Party — are sparring for positions in the 1944 campaign. The labor strategists are naturally making the most, for the present, of the strike at the Catavi tin mines early last winter when soldiers of the Penaranda army shot up a crowd of striking miners, causing many casualties.

The leftist party, PIR — Partido Izquierdo Revolucionario — has been busy ever since, trying to pin responsibility for this bloody business on certain members of President Peharanda’s cabinet, partly out of genuine indignation and partly to embarrass the Penaranda faction in next year’s elections.

Lately, the PIR has also been charging the Penaranda government with lying down on the job of forcing the multimillionaire tin interests of the country to make some improvements in the pay, living conditions, and social security arrangements of the tin miners. Such changes were recommended by the commission which was sent down from the United States to Bolivia last spring under Federal Judge Calvert Magruder of Boston.

While measuring how much sop he must finally throw to the PIR and the miners, however, President Penaranda has been busy creating some even more exciting diversions. During the winter, Bolivia began agitating rather plausibly and tactfully the question of recovering by some diplomatic purchase method the Pacific port of Arica, which she lost sixty years ago to Chile in a war between the South American west coast powers. But since he made a visit to the United States and a grand tour of most of the Latin American capitals, General Penaranda has converted this modest proposal of a negotiation into a militant nationalist issue.

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The result is that, where Chile last winter appeared willing at least to consider some discussions of new arrangements with Bolivia about Arica, the militarygroups in both countries today are going around with chips on their shoulders. In fact, some alarmists in diplomatic circles regard the Chilean-Bolivian tension as the most dangerous trouble spot in the whole hemisphere at the moment.

There is the further embarrassment, too, to President Peharanda’s hosts on his recent travels, who failed to say a flat “No” to his discourses on Bolivia’s need for a west coast outlet — so that he now claims them alb, including the United States, as backers of Bolivia’s demand for Arica.

If there had been a little more plain speaking on the point of shushing militancy over Arica until after the war, General Penaranda might have thought twice before he returned to his people in the political posture of a belligerent nationalist. If there were a clearer conviction in all the Latin American countries of the partiality of the big United Nations for democratic elements and democratic processes in nations associated with them in the war, there would be less temptation for adventurers on horseback to try to ride into authoritarian presidencies.

Cracks in inter-American solidarity

All up and down the inter-American front there are rifts and discords, similar in kind and origin to Bolivia’s. Mexico’s war effort has been diminished and her internal politics bedeviled by a constant popular turmoil over rapid inflation and rising prices — a circumstance which the Nazi and Spanish Falange propaganda has used both boldly and adroitly to sow distrust of the war partnership with the “imperialist” Y ankees.

Violent political disturbances have barely been prevented in Ecuador, with revolution and the ousting of the Arroyo del Rio government as the direct objective. Even in Panama late in August, under the guns of the Canal Zone, a conspiracy was detected for an uprising to put back in power the remnants o; the pro-Fascist clique of former President Arnulfo Arias.

Some of these difficulties are, of course, in the nature of Latin American politics. But there would almost certainly be fewer of them if Latin American leaders and their thinking followers had a clearer conception of the kind of world the United Nations are heading them into.

More and more, as the distressed and weaker countries feel the hardships of the war, they are troubled by their confusion as to where they are going in it. And this confusion inspires their more irresponsible politicians to increasingly fantastic actions. If we do not shortly adopt a stronger and a plainer line both in world and in inter-American policy, we may see more bewildered politics — and more damage to our cause — below the Rio Grande.